Static site generators versus WordPress

WordPress is the dominant method to build and manage a website, but static site generators are surging in popularity amongst developers and for certain types of websites.

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The current state of affairs

In 2016, WordPress is far from the only choice for a new website. In fact, website owners have enjoyed a plethora of options (hosted and self-hosted) for many years. WordPress has remained the juggernaut solution for self-hosted websites, with 25% marketshare of the total web, and as the mainstay CMS for small-to-medium businesses with small or low budgets.

Amongst two groups — large institutions that need high scalability, and the ever-tinkering developer crowd — another option is trending positively: the static site generator, also known as a flat-file CMS.

Don’t get me wrong — the WordPress install base is huge, and the threat posed by static site generators is small. But it’s growing. Post Status editor Brian Krogsgard polled developers prior to Pressnomics, to assess the threat level posed by various CMSs and publishing platforms; Medium and static site generators were considered more of a threat than any others:

He also wrote in a newsletter to members in November, 2015, “Didn’t I just mention about the appeal of static sites? I really think they’re a big top-end threat,” referring to the launch of vets.gov. Earlier that month, Smashing Magazine christened them the next big thing. A number of high profile websites use static site generators, from Vox Media to Barack Obama.

A spate of flat-file CMS options have become strong contenders: GitHub’s Jekyll is by far the most popular, but it’s joined by Grav, Couch, Pico, and more. You can even host your static site on GitHub Pages for free, and they’re happy to let you use a custom domain.

Historical WordPress advantages

The continuing appeal of WordPress has been fourfold:

The ability to get started very cheaply, without a monthly fee on top of hosting costs.

The liberty to use a custom domain name.

A robust ecosystem that provides thousands of free or inexpensive themes and plugins.

Since Jekyll and its ilk are mostly open-source, advantage #1 is wiped out. GitHub Pages knocks out advantage #2. WordPress retains the upper hand regarding #3 and #4. Younger projects have a long way to go before they can rival the WordPress community, and they’re still focused on serving fellow developers rather than everyday consumers. Until that changes, big web hosts won’t bother to enable ultra-easy installation.

Modern WordPress drawbacks

WordPress does have legitimate downsides, especially if you’re already a competent web developer or you’re focused on the highest levels of technical performance.

Site speed is ever more important in an age of social distribution and mobile browsing, and made more difficult considering site assets and page weights seem to be constantly getting larger. WordPress can be difficult to scale for high levels of traffic, and certain site architecture decisions can get developers in trouble.

Finally, security is a concern for some people that choose static site generators. WordPress has opportunities for user input that static site generators do not. It is also a natural target of hackers, simply due to its popularity. And static site generators are almost completely locally stored — aside from the output itself — whereas WordPress (potentially outdated, along with underlying themes and plugins) is stored on the server, more vulnerable to attacks.

Why WordPress is still winning

As I noted amongst its historical advantages, WordPress has an unparalleled ecosystem of plugins, add-ons, and extensions. (For comparison, the Jekyll Plugins website only lists fifty-two options at the time of writing.) It’s also relatively easy for non-technical people to install and use WordPress, in part because mainstream hosting companies put in the effort to make it easy, but even prior to such conveniences WordPress boasted, “the famous 5-minute install.” And static site generators are just not as powerful as traditional content management systems, especially in regard to user input.

Among the static site generators, Jekyll in particular is working toward feature parity, but it will take a long time. Current ease-of-use tools like Prose, a content editor that integrates with GitHub, and CloudCannon’s Jekyll GUI, which aims to help developers collaborate with clients, are in their infancy in terms of adoption and are still finicky to use.

It can be tempting to look longingly at the growing ecosystem around static site generators. It’s also easy to forget just how much you get “for free” with built-in WordPress functionality. Static site generators definitely play a role in the modern web, and can be a great choice for certain types of websites. But no static site generator signals the end for WordPress and its continuously strong community.

The future — what should you do?

Since you’re reading Post Status, it seems fair to assume that you’re part of the WordPress ecosystem, and very likely earn a living from it. Should you be panicking? No, for all the reasons I laid out.

But any wise professional keeps an eye on the future of their industry. We are seeing a trend, and over time Jekyll and its siblings will gain more marketshare. It’s probably worth your time to try out a few flat-file CMS options, get familiar with how to use and customize them, and perhaps consider what WordPress itself can learn from them.

I recall testing the default themes and they do pretty well on pagespeed and gtmetrix.
To your point, you’re in trouble once you start adding plugins and using any of the million suboptimized themes. Only a handful of themes actually share upfront their pagespeed score (which can still very much be mostly thanks to a very well configured server… anyways)

If you’re building sites that aren’t changing too often, I’d recommend ditching your performance plugins and using one of the caching plugins that serves static HTML files instead of optimized dynamic ones.

GT Metrix is mostly just measuring frontend setup, not actual load time, which is where WordPress fails when loaded dynamically. But when comparing to WordPress to a static site generator, it’s only worth comparing to an extremely heavily cached site, in which case all performance benefits of the static site generator are gone.

So basically, static site generators offer no benefit in speed unless your WordPress site is borked, or has more features than the static site.

A point of clarification: static site generators and flat-file CMSes aren’t quite the same thing.

Static site generators take a collection of templates, stylesheets, Markdown, etc., process those, and spit out a bunch of HTML files. You can host these almost anywhere, even places that heavily restrict the types of files they serve, like GitHub Pages, Amazon S3, and so on.

Flat-file CMSes, on the other hand, simply use files and folders to house data instead of a database. Their template files are still processed and converted to HTML dynamically on demand. Grav, for example, uses PHP templates just like WordPress.

Also, saying “GitHub’s Jekyll” is sort of like saying “Automattic’s WordPress”. 😛 Jekyll was created by Tom Preston-Werner, who was indeed the co-founder of GitHub, but I don’t think Jekyll was ever an internal-only project.

1. Static site generators or Flat-file CMSes which one is better?
2. Static site generators or Flat-file CMSes which one is easier and most recommended to be used by an individual who is not programming savvy?

1. Static Site Generator generates pages in your machine in HTML form while Flat-file CMSes use PHP or another language to generate user required page at server side and its never beats pure HTML templates. According to me, Static Site Generator are best.
2. Flat-file CMS is more user-friendly in terms of administration.

No idea how many WP sites owners use this intentionally but the fact is a LOT of caching / site optimization / site acceleration plugins essentially do one thing : export static HTML files and control the caching expiration.

CDNs would do something somewhat similar too, eventhough they can be an overkill for most sites.

Thanks for writing this. Having built more than sixty WordPress sites, and half as many static sites, I have my own preferences and biases. However, I think the “this vs that” idea overstates what’s happening.

Each of these technologies have their place and should be used for the right use-case. It just so happens that WordPress is very often overkill for what a lot of sites need, and now that there is a robust ecosystem around static sites, they’re being used more often. I don’t think that’s a threat. In fact, the WordPress ecosystem would arguably be better off if it were more focused. I think the mistake many make with WordPress is using it for everything, no matter if it’s the right tool for the job (and I have made that mistake!).

At any rate, static and WordPress should, in my view, be considered as complimentary: use a static site generator unless the use-case requires something like WordPress. As a starter, static sites still mostly require more developer skill than WordPress, and anyone reliant on plugins or themes will be much happier using WordPress.

Flat-file CMS’s, which are not static site generators at all, and are more like WordPress than static sites, also have their use-cases – more like WordPress-lite.

Any idea on the SEO advantages/disadvantages of a static site generator?

I had a client who hired me to do some SEO work for her ECWID hosted site, which is, as I understand it, a static site generator system. Google’s bots cannot scan the pages as they do a WordPress or similar type of site, and so can’t catalog them for use in the SERP’s. Since the pages are created on the fly, there is no page to scan.

Ryan, thanks for the reply.
That is my whole point and perhaps I did not phrase the question correctly.

On this system, and maybe it’s peculiar to this system, there is no page to crawl. It only exists when a user clicks on it. This system was described in their help forums as static site generated and Webmaster Tools cannot be used on it. It has nothing to crawl.

If that is the case universally for a site using statically generated pages, I would think that would be bad for any site’s SEO. If you are big, popular and well branded, this will probably not be a big issue. If you are small and constantly working to build and fill the sales funnel, this is an issue.

This also may not be the case for such sites universally. I could understand this not being an issue on a flat file site, but if pages are created only on the fly, as they are on ECWID and never cataloged for the SERP’s that could a serious impediment to this system’s adoption, despite its speed advantage.

The team behind the Amimoto-AMI is working on a static generator for WordPress sites. From what I’ve seen, it should be an amazing option for people who would benefit most from static content but need the power of the WP.

Indeed, static (e.g. Jekyll) and dynamic (wordpress) sites have their place.
I have seen far too many sites built on wordpress that were nothing more than an index/informational page and a contact page. WordPress was definitely overkill and a simple static (does it change often? No? Go static) would have been more than sufficient.

I think that is where web designers/developers need to focus when determining what their client needs are.